What's the point of phone verification?

So...I recently encountered an issue and Discord's solution seems rather clueless to me.

Like many of other people, I got suddenly locked out of my account on all Discord clients (browser, Windows app, Android app) and I got requested of verifying my account via phone number. As I consider phone number rather sensitive information, I don't like an idea of giving it to what I consider mainly gaming app, so I asked the support what on Earth is going on. For several minutes before the lockout, I have been going through my old messages, looking for a conversation I had with the person whose nick I don't remember. I was therefore going through servers I'm connected to, checking people there and if their nick rang any bells, I opened a direct message to them to check if that's the one I was looking for. If not (and until the lockout, it was not), I closed the conversation without any sending anything. I suspected the bots considered what I've been doing to be spamming of some sort.

Support's answer, while cooperative and polite by whatever criteria one might use, told me that the bots detected something suspicious, which I knew already from the phone verification request itself, and the support added a hint that the bot might have detected a VPN or proxy that had already been targeted by Discord in the past. I never used any proxy or VPN and I don't share my connection with anyone, but since I have no way of convincing the Discord staff otherwise, I chose not to press for lifting the verification request, as from their point of view, I gave no reason to think the bots triggered mistakenly. Now, reading through the posts here, it seems the support might not even been able to, but that's another matter for now.

My question is this: if Discord suspects me of using VPN / proxy and it's a reason for at least temporarily locking me out, what the hell is the point of phone verification? Even if I did use VPN / proxy, which I never have...if all it takes is giving Discord my phone number and typing in the code they send me, where is the part of stopping me from using said VPN / proxy, which is what triggered the bot in the first place? The only difference that would happen is Discord having my phone number, but nothing would stop me from using VPN / proxy further on, which makes the phone verification in this case nothing but a fruitless nuisance for rule-breakers and pointless bother for non-rule-breakers.

Or is there something I'm missing?

In case there isn't, I'd like to ask Discord team to rethink measures that are being taken and reconsider their real effect, possibly changing measures to ones that can prevent the suspected activity that triggered them.

Thanks

Girion